Brooklyn Museum Sues to Keep Mayor From Freezing Its Funds

By DAVID BARSTOW

Published: September 29, 1999

In a pronounced escalation of the political and cultural conflict over an impending art exhibition, the Brooklyn Museum of Art filed a lawsuit in Federal court yesterday that accuses Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of violating the First Amendment by threatening to withdraw city funds from the museum because he finds some of the artworks offensive and insulting to religion.

In taking the action, the museum abandoned its recent efforts to resolve the dispute through some form of negotiated compromise. The museum's board voted overwhelmingly yesterday to reject Mr. Giuliani's request for another day of negotiations, and there was no more talk of removing or segregating those works that the Mayor deemed most troubling.

By pre-emptively filing a lawsuit, museum officials said that they hoped to thrust the dispute into the constitutional arena of free speech and expression, thereby undercutting the city's legal strategy of challenging the exhibition on the narrow grounds that it violated the museum's lease with the city.

''This litigation is not just about the Brooklyn Museum of Art,'' Robert S. Rubin, the chairman of the museum's board, said during a tense late afternoon press conference in the museum's lobby. ''It is being undertaken in the interests of all public institutions -- museums, universities and libraries -- that are dedicated to the free exchange of ideas and information, and in the interests of the people they serve.''

The response from City Hall was swift and angry. Mayor Giuliani was traveling yesterday on a political trip to Washington and Las Vegas, but Deputy Mayor Joseph J. Lhota described the Mayor's reaction by saying, ''The Mayor was not surprised by the level of arrogance shown by the board of the museum.''

City officials immediately ordered the cancellation of the next scheduled payment, $497,554, which is due on Friday.

But officials said the city would not take more drastic steps to prevent the exhibition from going forward as planned on Saturday. City officials instead focused their efforts on seizing control of the museum through what they predicted would be protracted litigation.

''This board has decided to violate state law, violate the provisions of their lease with the city of New York, and more importantly, violate the bylaws that they operate under,'' said Mr. Lhota, who attended yesterday's meeting of the museum board along with Corporation Counsel Michael D. Hess.

Arnold Lehman, the director of the museum, gave one indication of its newly aggressive posture when he politely but firmly evicted Mr. Hess and Mr. Lhota from a podium in the museum's lobby, where the two had paused after the board meeting to answer reporters' questions.

A short time later, Mr. Hess summed up the rising emotions on both sides for three officials outside City Hall. ''We've got a big mess,'' he told them. ''We've got World War III now.''

Throughout the day, religious and cultural organizations joined the fray, staking out positions in a fight rich with political implications for Mayor Giuliani's expected Senate race against Hillary Rodham Clinton, as well as with legal implications for publicly financed art institutions.

For the first time since the dispute began last week, other museums and arts groups in New York City spoke out in support of the Brooklyn Museum. Backing the museum was the Cultural Institutions Group, made up of 33 city museums and arts organizations, which sent a letter to the Mayor yesterday signed by 18 members of the group and 6 nonmember institutions warning that his actions would have a chilling effect on all city financed museums.

''The expectation that New York City's government-assisted institutions must make sure that city officials find inoffensive every future exhibition or performance would cause lasting damage, not only to the Brooklyn Museum of Art, but to all of our cultural institutions, and to our city,'' said the letter, whose signers included Philippe de Montebello, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Glenn D. Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art.

Supporting the Mayor was the Orthodox Union, the country's largest association of Orthodox Jewish organizations, which issued a statement yesterday condemning the exhibition, especially a painting called ''The Holy Virgin Mary'' by the British artist Chris Ofili. The work has a clump of elephant dung on one breast. The Mayor has described the painting by Mr. Ofili, who is a Roman Catholic, as Catholic-bashing.

''Displaying a religious symbol splattered with dung is deeply offensive and can hardly be said to have any redeeming social or artistic value,'' said the Orthodox Union's president, Mandell Ganchrow. ''Today the offense is perpetrated against a Christian symbol. Tomorrow it might be a Jewish ritual item, and then of another faith.''

The museum's lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, seeks a court order declaring that Mayor Giuliani ''may not inflict any punishment, retaliation or sanction of any kind'' against the museum for staging the exhibition.

Such punishment, the suit said, includes terminating the museum's lease, seizing the museum building, cutting off funding, or firing the museum's Board of Trustees.

The museum is represented by Floyd Abrams, one of the nation's best-known First Amendment lawyers.